October 7: BackerKit DEADLINE. PLUS: Final Deluxe Box design!

In this update: BackerKit deadline announced • Sneak peek photos from the factory in China • THIS IS HOW YOU DIE now available as an add-on • Pictures of some weird sketchbooks • Convention info!

In today's video: I visit Jason Lioi's LASER FACILITY and show you the final design of the wooden deluxe boxes! Jason runs the website Dapper Devil, which sells laser-cut and -etched gaming tokens, and he also makes and sells fancy items in his Etsy store. Now he's making 1100 wooden boxes for us! Watch the video to see how!

BACKERKIT DEADLINE: October 7

IMPORTANT: If you want to make changes or additions to your order, you have through OCTOBER 7 only. We will be LOCKING DOWN all BackerKit orders on October 8. Any add-ons you’ve got in your cart will be finalized, and your card charged, at that time. So if you’d still like to add or subtract anything from your order, you only have about ONE WEEK to do so – because we have to know how many of everything to print!

** If you need to change your shipping address, no need to write to me! Just log into your account at machineofdeath.backerkit.com, or write to support@backerkit.com with any questions. **

We are still on track to receive the games in our warehouse around the first or second week of November. Shipping of all items will begin immediately thereafter. I don't know exactly how long it will take the Make That Thing staff to pack and ship 10,000 games and related items, but we will soon find out!

The point being, make sure we have the address you'll be at in November/December. You can log in at machineofdeath.backerkit.com to make any necessary changes to your address.

Once again, October 7 is the deadline for additions or changes to your BackerKit items. I believe your shipping address can still be changed after that, but new add-on items cannot be added after that.

PRODUCTION UPDATES

A lot has happened since I last spoke with you!

All the composers have finished their timer music tracks, and I’ve just received them back from mastering! The next step is to get them assembled into an album and plugged into the web-app. They sound GREAT. And there are a few...surprises in there, I guess one could say.

Work continues on the bonus rewards -- the game audiobook (which will be read by Kris), the rules song, the merit badge, the goats. (You know, all the important stuff.) The German content is nearly done; it’s moving into the proofreading phase now, and then we’ll post the downloadable print-and-play versions of the cards!

I got to visit the factory where the actual games are being made! I was invited to Huizhou, China, with a conversation that went like this:

The kind folks at WinGo Industry said “When are you coming for your factory tour?”

To which I said, “What do you mean?”

They said, “Aren’t you coming to do a final inspection?”

“I…wasn’t planning on it?”

“Oh, you’re not coming? Fine, when can we expect your third-party inspector?”

“Inspector? Can’t you can just, I dunno, mail me a sample?”

“I suppose we could. So you’re not going to come to China at all, then?”

Then, something clicked in my head, and I said “Well, hold on, let’s not be hasty” and then I made a bunch of plans and got a visa and went to China! LESSON LEARNED: Never pass up a fully justified reason to take an awesome trip somewhere!

I took along my friend Chun Ming Huang, who HAPPENS TO BE both a cinematographer and a native Cantonese speaker. Chun Ming shot a bunch of great video of the trip, and the factory, and all the cool little details. The video is being edited now, and I'll share it with you when it's ready!

For now, here's just a little taste. It's incredible that I sent these folks half a world away a bunch of PDF files, and then I show up and there's a warehouse full of THIS:

It was incredible. Pallet after pallet of game boxes...Stacks four feet high of uncut card sheets...A sack full of hundreds of dice...Workers diligently collating cards. A master craftsman who was manually forming the cutting die for the tuck boxes. I can't wait to share the video with you.

But that will come soon! And soon, as well, will be the day when all those many boxes, their innards full and sated with game cards and components, will be packed into cartons, and the cartons placed on pallets, and the pallets loaded into a container, and the container put on a boat, and the boat goes across an ocean, and a crane unloads it somewhere, and a person with a clipboard checks something, and then there’s probably a truck or two trucks or maybe a train or WHO KNOWS and eventually everything arrives in a warehouse in Massachusetts. And then you get them!!

THE DELUXE BOXES

This is the final design for the wooden boxes!!

Once we received the final card & tuck box dimensions from the printer, we calculated the size that the box had to be in order to hold the full set of sleeved cards (which some people had asked for). If all 1000+ cards are sleeved, it all just fits.

Or, if you keep the cards in the tuck boxes, you’ll have plenty of room for future expansions. The tin versions of the cards fit in here just fine too.

(Not pictured: two more engraved acrylic inserts, plus the Mission Log booklet, Signature Certificate, and Target Intel notepad. All those, plus the above components, plus a Quick Start card and one more blank box to act as a spacer, come in the Deluxe Box.)

It all looks super cool! In today's video, Jason gives us just a little behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the boxes are made.

You CAN still upgrade your pledge from a basic box to a deluxe box, but only through October 7, and as of right now, there are only about 60 left unclaimed. So if you want to, you can add on the Deluxe Box Upgrade in BackerKit – just do it soon.

FINAL NOTE ABOUT ADD-ONS

Three more very quick things about add-ons, because I've gotten a lot of questions about them.

FIRSTLY, you can now also get a copy of our new Machine of Death book, THIS IS HOW YOU DIE, via BackerKit, to be shipped with your game. Previously we didn't want to offer it, because leading up to the book's release in July, we wanted everyone to patronize their local bookstore.

But now that some time has passed, and we only have a week left for add-ons, we're making the option available. So if you want to add the book to your game order, as many have requested, you can now do so via BackerKit.

SECONDLY, one of the add-ons has puzzled some from the beginning. "What are 'Tweet Me Harder Sketchbooks'?"

Tweet Me Harder was a comedy podcast that I did with Kris Straub. TMH was an antecedent to the sense of humor that Kris and I brought to the MOD game, so I knew there'd be a lot of crossover in terms of the audience. The podcast is in iTunes if you're interested (just search 'Tweet Me Harder'), and we're offering the whole run of 76 episodes on a thumb drive as well (it's in BackerKit as an add-on).

But the sketchbooks are a goofy sort of idea that we came up with late one night. Our TMH book collection, Hey World Here Are Some Suggestions, shipped with an optional 'Disguise Mode' fake book jacket that made it look like you were reading a much more interesting book. The sketchbooks are the same idea: they make you look like you're carrying around AMAZING BOOKS.

(Earlier we offered these designs as book jackets, as well. The logistics of those proved challenging on a mass scale – but for those few people who already ordered them, we'll honor those orders.)

LASTLY, some folks have been asking if it's possible to get extra dice. To which I say: Sure! We ordered some extras, so if you'd like another die, they're just a buck in BackerKit. Only one color is available: DEEP BLOOD RED.

On some of 'em, the red shows through the white to give it a bit of a pink cast, which I think is kinda cool.

THANK YOU.

I need to say thanks so much to everyone who came by and said hello at a recent appearance, whether San Diego Comic-Con, Gen Con, PAX, or XOXO. (Some of you were even REPEAT OFFENDERS). It’s really cool to put faces to the long list of names on a spreadsheet. I also appreciate the many admiring gasps and low whistles at the beauty and majesty of our prototype game boxes!!

I’d also like to publicly thank Max Temkin and the entire crew of the Cards Against Humanity booth at PAX. He was gracious enough to invite MOD to share their space (a rather menacing 20-foot-tall black box), and we were fortunate to be there, cloistered in with a steady stream of people who were there because they liked dark, funny, nonsensical card games. Which worked out great for us!

We played dozens and dozens of game demos, signed lots of copies of MACHINE OF DEATH and THIS IS HOW YOU DIE (the books), and must have performed well over 300 death prediction tests. So now a bunch of people know how they will die! Which they may or may not have been expecting to learn when they entered the Cards Against Humanity booth. Anyway I consider it a public service.

That's me and my helper Zach, there, inside the giant PAX box.

Max also invited me to XOXO, a cool sort of "creative entrepreneurship" conference in Portland, where I got to play the game for five hours straight, demonstrating it for groups of players who had anywhere from zero to a shockingly rich understanding of the game. It was exhausting, but a tremendously enjoyable time!

At XOXO, Max gave a great talk about the genesis of Cards Against Humanity, and more to the point, the importance of steering that ship with reference to a core set of values. I bet at some point the talk will be online on XOXO's YouTube channel, and I recommend you watch it when it is. In the meantime, the videos on there now – from last year's conference – are surely worth checking out as well.

Okay I've gone on long enough! TO RECAP:

Deadline to add or change BackerKit orders is OCTOBER 7

You can now add copies of THIS IS HOW YOU DIE

There are only about 60 Deluxe Boxes still available for upgrades (via BackerKit)

The games are getting ACTUAL. I SAW THEM. They are in China right now but they are DEFINITELY REAL.

Thanks as always for your kind support and wonderfully firm handshakes. We're in the home stretch!!

BONUS INFO: Next month, October 12-13, I'll be in San Francisco for the Alternative Press Expo. Hope to see you there!

Comments

I just got around to checking this update... too late for a deluxe box upgrade. Slightly disappointed at myself, but strangely relieved as well, as I won't have to make a Hard Decision about it (Jay's predicament). The news that they're sold out is really cool, though, kind of like the all-stretch-goals-met thing.

The TIHYD thing is pretty cool, too. You were aiming for that book to hit the New York Times' bestseller list, right? Any word on how that turned out? I'll probably snag a copy from the bookstores as soon as my pocketbook stops scowling at me...

Hello from PAX. Like, a month late. I'm the crazy dumb bastard with the black market card for a COMBINATION BEAST. I can't wait to to kill a head of state with my VICTORIAN SPACE PIRANHA TURTLE. Good times.

@Kelly – The 'Book Disguises' were book jackets with the same designs, our original version of what we later realized would work better as sketchbooks. I can switch your order to the sketchbooks, no problem.

@Jackson – The box is indeed pretty packed. We had to make a decision as to how big to make the boxes such that they could hold all the sleeved cards, but still not be TOO comically oversized for folks who don't sleeve the cards. I haven't tried this, but I bet there's a way to fit (most of?) the sleeved cards in the regular and the sidecar box as well, if you leave the tuck boxes out. AN EXERCISE LEFT TO THE USER

I just checked and there are, as of this moment, only EIGHTEEN Deluxe Boxes left unclaimed! Hooray!

That should be "total added," not "total"... I also gave some serious thought to a deluxe box upgrade, but I'll definitely be sleeving my cards and the box looked just a little *too* packed with sleeves.

Well, you got me on the books. I picked up a trade paperback copy of each, in addition to the Disposable Edition of the first book that I got as part of my pledge level... which I will treat as such and give to a friend. :-) I also picked up an additional skull die, to bring my pre-shipping total to an even $42... because The Machine has The Answer. :-D

The Tweet Me Harder set is still confusing me. I have an addon listed as the "Tweet Me Harder Book Disguises (6)" I don't remember there being sketchbook versions as an option back when I did the add-on part. Can I make it the sketchbooks instead of the disguise kit ?

Hey, it's the guy that originally brought up sleeved cars ^^. Thanks a ton man, it looks great. I just hope Dragon Sleeves fit in there well and not just penny sleeves (oh no, the picky gamer's coming out :P). I'm sure it'll be fine! The box looks great and I can't wait to play this at some parties :).

Squeeeee! Loving the pictures! The video with the dice actually made me laugh out loud, well played. I can not wait to have the deluxe box in my hands so I can stroke it and love it and... well, that's pretty much all I'm going to to with the box. It's so exciting to see things coming together and being made like this!